The year could have been 1791; it could have been 1868; it could have been 1931. The men could have been veterans of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, or World War I. It could be that the events of which this writer writes never took place, that they are all just figments of his imagination. But let’s pretend that they really took place. One year, when times were hard, some veterans of a long forgotten war were in want of some money. So a group of angry war veterans got together and decided to march on Washington, D.C. They had been promised pensions by a grateful nation for their services, but you know how governments are about bestowing pensions upon their veterans. In the years since the last war, the government had forgotten its promise to its veterans.
This March took place during a year when the bottom had fallen out of the economy. Homeowners lost homes, farmers lost farms, and many people were homeless or living in shantytowns. The police would order the dwellers of these shantytowns to move on while they demolished their dwellings, but the shantytowns inevitably sprang up in another part of town: in a park, on the village green, or anywhere where there was enough space to build a shantytown. These shantytowns got to be an eyesore after a while, but there was nothing that towns could do about them; there were too many homeless people.
One day, a farmer named Joe who had lost his land got the idea of marching on Washington and demanding money from the government. He had served in the last war and been promised money twenty or thirty years later, but he need his money now. He had already lost his farm, and he had tried to make a go of it by running an illegal still a few times, but each time he tried to operate his still, the revenuers came and broke it up. With him, his wife and his five children homeless and living in a shantytown, he figured that he had nothing to lose.
Joe and his family lived far away from Washington, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, near Marquette. Joe and a few of his buddies started their crusade in Marquette, then crossed into Wisconsin, where they drew more former veterans to their cause. Each state where they went, former veterans who had lost their homes and their land joined their march: Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia. Soon thousands of angry war veterans marched on Washington, D.C., demanding the pensions that the government had promised them.
One fine day, when the Japanese cherry trees began to blossom, the intrepid band of veterans appeared on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, where they built a shantytown. The authorities in Virginia didn’t know what to do. The veterans sent Joe to present their peitition to Congress. At first, like the authorities in Virginia, the Congressmen didn’t know what to do, either. Then the House quickly voted on a bill to give them their pensions immediately. The Senate, however, let the bill die in committee. That’s because the Senate is a more deliberative body than the House.
Most of the 25,000 veterans decided to go home, but about 2,000 of them, led by Joe, gathered in front of the Washington Monument, demanding their pensions. Finally, the President sent the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with a battalion and orders to disperse this mob. With a corn cob pipe in his mouth, the general said to the veterans: “This is an illegal gathering. You are ordered to disperse and go home.”
However, Joe and his fellow veterans had marched hundreds of miles to Washington; they didn’t come all this way just to disperse and go home. When it was clear that the veterans were not going to disperse, the general ordered his men to charge. Since some of the general’s men were on horseback, the veterans were at a great disadvantage. As well, Joe and his buddies were armed with nothing but sticks and stones, while the general had armed infantry at his disposal. It was not an equal fight. In their haste to flee, some of Joe’s men were trampled, either by each other or the men on horseback. A few were shot by soldiers.
Since it was now a rout, Joe and his buddies tried to retreat across the Potomac River back into Virginia, but the bridge to Virginia was blocked by Virginia State Police. When Joe and his buddies realized that they couldn’t cross the Potomac into Virginia, they decided to try the bridge to Maryland; but that bridge was blocked by Maryland State Police. There was a scuffle between the veterans and the Maryland State Police, but the veterans were unable to cross the bridge into Maryland.
Stragglers were arrested by the Washington D.C. municipal police and the Maryland State Police, but some of them managed to sneak across the Potomac River and make their way home. Joe arrived home in the Upper Peninsula and found his lot no better than before. His family was still living in a shantytown, and he could not find work in the copper mines of the Keewanau Peninsula because he was branded as a Communist sympathizer.
That was how Joe became a labor activist.
No comments:
Post a Comment